The Woman in Artichoke Green A late August afternoon: the sun wallows in the breakers like an old dog rolling in something that smells real good, happy as the sea lions on the beach barking. Here on holiday we stand on the sidewalk, watch the slick beasts, and pretend this day is forever— until a […]
Author Archive | Martha Shelley
Books for the Holidays
By Martha Shelley on October 23, 2015 in Ebisu Publications, The Stars in their Courses, The Throne in the Heart of the Sea
The holidays are coming. What better present than a book? You can purchase The Throne in the Heart of the Sea and The Stars in their Courses in three ways: if you live in Portland, you can go to St. Johns Booksellers. Both books are also available through the publisher’s website, www.ebisupublications.com. And if you […]
Rabble-rousing in the Big Apple
Speaking at the Stonewall The Stonewall Inn, where gays fought back against a police raid in 1969, is now the first national heritage site honoring gay people’s struggles. (For those who’ve never been there, it’s in Greenwich Village.) I was asked to be part of an event on Sept 20, promoting the idea of making […]
Saturday Night in St. Johns
Crows roosting for the night I seem to be on a poetry jag. This is a first draft: Our town is an extremity, the northernmost finger of a swarming city. The main drag on Saturday night: the sun at its lowest flings javelins of red gold light through maple branches illuminates the flights of mosquitoes, […]
The FBI and me
This month I read about a young Muslim couple—he is 22 and she, 19—arrested in Mississippi. Their crime was trying to travel abroad to join the Islamic state. Apparently they had been exchanging emails with an FBI agent pretending to be an Islamist, and he’d encouraged them in this endeavor. These young people hadn’t committed […]
The Mighty Hunters–Now and Then
Assyrian king portrayed as a lion hunter Many of you have read about the dentist who paid $54,000 for the privilege of luring the lion Cecil out of a wildlife sanctuary, shooting him, and taking his head and skin home as trophies. People were outraged, but it wasn’t a unique occurrence. Just in the last […]
The First Little Girl on Mars
When I was ten, my ambition was to go to Mars. I imagined stepping out of a spaceship and onto the surface of the red planet, greeting the little green natives. In my mind’s eye I would look very much as I did then: around four feet tall, bespectacled, wearing a knee-length wool jumper, my […]
Stars, Planets, and Poetry
The Willamette meteorite, with children When I was young, I wanted to be an astronomer or an astronaut. My parents were kind enough to take me to the Hayden Planetarium once or twice a year, where I got to see the sky show, step on a scale that told me what I’d weigh on Jupiter, […]
Losses
A couple of weeks ago we suffered some losses on our little farmette in Portland. (For those readers who aren’t in the neighborhood, we have a double lot, and cultivate it intensively.) I was pretty miserable, so I coped with it the only way a writer can–I wrote a poem:: A Crack in the Crust […]
In Jail: New York, 1970
Strip search from a how-to-do-it manual In my last post I described witnessing police assaults on citizens. Of course the cruelty doesn’t stop on the streets. I was arrested during Women’s Liberation actions in 1970. The police treated us quite gently, since all of us were white, and they considered feminists more of a joke […]